Abortion as contraception? A logical examination of this myth.
i have thought about blogging on this topic for a while now. for those of you that don’t know, i’m an adult undergraduate student at a conservative christian university in mississippi. i returned to mississippi after eight years in the mid-west, partially to be closer to family and partially to finish my education. in the area where i live, i had three choices of universities, one public and two private. i heard that belhaven university (then belhaven college) had a program specifically made for adults. it was meant to accommodate those who worked 40 hour a week jobs (which i did at the time) and it was accelerated; it was possible to transfer in credits and finish up my degree taking 1-2 classes per week at night. my sister had attended the other private christian university, millsaps, as a traditional undergrad, and i mistakenly assumed that like millsaps, belhaven was christian in name only. i was extremely wrong.
i have chosen to stay at belhaven for a myriad of reasons. first and foremost, it’s easier and quicker to finish my degree there. if all goes as planned i will graduate this december. also, i am a christian in addition to being a radical liberal lesbian feminist and i thought that i had a unique opportunity to open people’s minds in some small way. at times, i have regretted my decision to stay at belhaven when met with students, professors, and class materials that are not only conservative but right-wing homophobic heterosexist and at times racist; yet i believe that belhaven is where i am meant to be. sometimes a class is more difficult for me than others, because i can’t just speak out on everything i have to pick my battles. the class i finished tonight, sociology 202 “the family” was one such class; it was marriage and family from a christian perspective. i was not alone though because it alienated divorcees, single mothers, and anyone who goes against “Biblical perspectives on marriage and family.”
tonight on my final exam, the professor revisited a topic that she had mentioned during the chapter on reproduction: “abortion as birth control.” the question (which i thankfully had the choice to answer and did not after my pro-trans rant on test one) said “explain how abortion has been used as contraception since Roe v Wade.” i’m not exactly sure how one could properly answer that question, given that the class discussion did not explain or answer that question, nor did the secular though conservative textbook. i imagine that at least several students chose that essay question, and i imagine that their answers are very similar to the class discussion, which was basically “THEY don’t use contraception, so when THEY get pregnant they have abortions. THEY use abortion as contraception.” now, this isn’t a racist argument because like most of the classes i’m in, 80% of the students are african american females. THEY seems to refer to simply “women that would have an abortion, because i surely never would.”
i am a social services student (ie, social work) and my classmates are 99% female, as i said above around 80% african american, and from discussions in and outside of class the great majority of them are single mothers. many of them were pregnant in their teens, it’s not uncommon. this is mississippi and we are #1 in teen birth rates at the moment. what seems clear to me as an activist, is that most young people are not using any type of contraception, much less using abortion as contraception, but still this anti-abortion myth prevails: somewhere out there someone you don’t know is either immoral or amoral and rather than take a pill or use a condom, they just run to the corner abortion clinic and terminate a pregnancy. they do this multiple times, because they don’t learn their lesson the first time. granted, i am sure we all know someone or know of someone who has for some reason not used contraception and has terminated an unwanted pregnancy. it stands to reason that outside rape, incest, and birth control failure that some of the women who seek abortions are doing so because they did not for whatever reason use contraception. however - using abortion AS contraception implies that these women are habitual multiple “offenders” who have abortion after abortion. so i want to break it down for you.
in the state of mississippi we have ONE abortion clinic, that’s right, one. there is ONE place in the 46, 914 square miles of this state where one can go to terminate a pregnancy. that clinic is in jackson, where i happen to reside. the city of jackson has a population of 130,694 people as of june 2008, and given that the male to female ratio in general is a little over 50:50 that means that there are a little over 65,000 women in the city. now for this blog post i am just going to estimate because i don’t have the time to figure out specifics, so just go with me. let’s say that of those 65,000 women 30% are either too young or too old to have children. that seems like a conservative figure to me. that means in the city of jackson there’s roughly 45,500 women of child-bearing age. now i have heard the statistic that 1 in 10 people is gay, and i know from experience there’s a surprisingly large lesbian population here, so let’s eliminate 10% of that 45,500 because they are not going to have consensual sex with a man. that means there’s not quite 41,000 straight women of child-bearing age in this general area. now remember, there’s only ONE place that you can receive an abortion in this state. the population of the entire state is just under 3 million according to the US census bureau. using the same figures that i broke down jackson with, that means that in our entire state there’s approximately 930,000 straight women of child bearing age who could in theory have an unwanted pregnancy.
only 22.7% of those women live in the jackson metro area. mississippi is not yet sprawing and urban, and while there are suburbs of jackson, the majority of women would have to travel at the very least one hour to visit the clinic. let’s go even crazier and say that an additional 10% of the female population of our state live less than an hour of jackson, that still means that 67.3% of the women who might have an unwanted pregnancy live an hour or more away from the clinic. this is the majority, and when you consider that the major universities (Mississippi State, Ole Miss, and the University of Southern Mississippi) are all more than one hour away from jackson it seems logical. according to my dear friend izzy, who is an amazing feminist activist and an expert on abortion in the state of mississippi, who has done countless hours of research on the topic, about 1300 abortions happen at our ONE abortion clinic each year. i cannot tell you where this information came from because i texted her saying i was annoyed and going to write a blog post and she was driving in her car, but i will tell you that if you want to know where this number came from, i will be able to get cite-able information from her in a matter of hours.
using these numbers (apx straight women of child-bearing age in the entire state and 1300 abortions per year) what this means is that .00139% of straight women of child-bearing age in this state seek out and follow through with an abortion each year. .00139% far less than 1% of the women of our state have an abortion. i would think that would be considered a victory by the anti-abortion activists, yet the attitude is that “babies are being killed” constantly without remorse. now, of 1300 abortions per year, how many do you think are “using abortion as contraception?” let’s remember that 67.3% of women have to travel over one hour by car to get to the clinic. they have to take a day off work or school, and they have to drive or have a ride to the clinic. let’s now take into consideration that mississippi has a 24 hour waiting period before a woman can have an abortion. what that means here is that a woman who wants an abortion must seek to courage to first call the clinic, she must set an appointment, she must have or find a way to get to the clinic, she must travel 3+ hours if she is coming from the delta or the gulf coast, she must physically be in the room with the doctor and receive the state mandated information about abortion she must leave and wait at a minimum 24 hours before having the procedure. this means if her initial appointment was at 2pm on tuesday her abortion cannot take place before 2pm on wednesday. so she must either live in jackson, get a hotel room in jackson, or find a way to get back to jackson. we all are unhappy about gas prices; last time i filled up at kroger i paid over $2.50 a gallon with my “10 cent reward” so gas isn’t cheap, we all know it. hotel rooms are going to be at least $30 in a seedy motel.
NOW let’s see what abortions cost! afterall, you can’t use insurance to pay for an abortion unless you get special insurance, because of the hyde amendment the government won’t pay for you to have an abortion unless you can prove that you were raped or a victim of incest (oh and did i mention in the state of mississippi you need written consent from not one but both parents, even if they’re divorced to receive an abortion if you are under the age of 18? what victim of incest can get that, ya think?) if you are on medicaid, chances are even if you could have it pay for an abortion you can’t get to jackson. according to the jackson women’s heath organization an abortion if you are less than 12 weeks pregnant will set you back $405 for the procedure (not including travel and lodging). those easy pills that they just give women to induce abortion (not the morning after pill, that doesn’t induce abortion, i’m talking about RU-486) that you just take a pill and wake up fetus free? ha ha. those are $520 if you are 12 weeks or less.
let’s ignore everything logical. let’s say that you were stupid, just didn’t use a condom, and now you have to get an abortion for contraceptive purposes. at the very least, if you’re lucky enough to live in jackson, you are going to be out a minimum of $405. let’s pretend that abortion isn’t an invasive medical procedure. let’s say that you thought you could just take a pill and it would go away with no pain, and you don’t care about the fact that you have all these messages that say abortion is wrong and a sin. let’s ignore the fact that if you go to the clinic here that you will have anti-abortion activists screaming at you, holding up huge pictures of alleged “killed babies” screaming about Jesus, telling you that your “baby” loves you, that you’re already a mother. let’s pretend that one of the scariest anti-abortion activists in the country, roy mcmillan, who once yelled at your doctor “you’re next!” [to be killed in cold blood] isn’t right there across the street, dressed up as santa if it happens to be december. how many of those .00139% women do you think want to go through that again? how many of those desperate .00139% do you think aren’t secretly torn up that she “killed her baby”? how many women have the $405 just lying around to have another abortion because it’s just “easier” than asking a partner to wear a condom you can get free from the health department? that’s not taking into account how many women have to travel over an hour and stay for at least 24 hours to have an abortion.
get off your high horse, asshole. this is mississippi. do you know, NOW (the national organization for women) does not have clinic escorts here? there’s no one to hold you hand and combat the hate that the antis scream. trust me, we would do it, and we did when we could, but for most women they go it alone or with a friend if they are lucky. are you so ridiculously out of touch with reality that you honestly believe that women - at least in the state of mississippi - will use an invasive medical procedure that they likely have to travel over an hour to get and pay out of pocket for as contraception? do you seriously think women that need an abortion have the time, the money, the means, the strength to go through what it takes, over an over? come the fuck on! in my state, and in most states, abortion clinics are not like starbucks. they aren’t on every corner. abortions aren’t cheap. they aren’t easy to get and it’s going to come out of your pocket. i haven’t even talked about the fact that in the state of mississippi there is no public school that teaches comprehensive sex education. you can’t get a condom at school, and i did speak up about that in class. your kid is NOT getting sex education in the public schools here, they are getting abstinence only and no one is giving them a condom for free. in fact, no one is giving them a condom without risking job loss.
i sincerely doubt that even one person in the state of mississippi is using “abortion as contraception.” yet i sit in a classroom full of people who want to judge a handfull of people they don’t even know. if there’s a culture of permissiveness toward abortion, it’s someplace else, it doesn’t exist here; and believe me, ain’t even one of those 1300 getting “on demand, without apology” abortions.
